Fiction is a literary magazine founded in 1972 by Mark Jay Mirsky, Donald Barthelme, Jane Delynn, and Max Frisch.

In its early years, Fiction was published in tabloid format and featured experimental work by such writers as John Barth, Jerome Charyn, Italo Calvino, Ronald Sukenick, Steve Katz, Russell Banks, Samuel Beckett, and J.G. Ballard. It later took the form of a more traditional paperback literary magazine, publishing short works by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Reinaldo Arenas, Isaac Babel, Donald Barthelme, Mei Chin, Julio Cortazar, Marguerite Duras, Natalia Ginzburg, Clarice Ginzburg, Jamaica Kincaid, Clarice Lispector, Robie Macaulay, Robert Musil, Joyce Carol Oates, Manuel Puig, John Yau, and others.

As you might imagine Fiction is comprised of a small staff of dedicated readers and we therefore operate on a rolling submission basis. If you have not heard from us, rest assured that your submission is still under consideration. Thank you for your patience.

The editors at Fiction thought it might be worthwhile for me to comment on stories that we published in the current issue so as to give readers of our Web page an incentive to find the magazine in bookstores or to subscribe. At the same moment a note came in from a writer whom I prize and whose work I teach, Cynthia Ozick, and she has given me permission to print it here. Since she has mentioned my story, “On Account of an Apple,” her comment will suffice.

According to James Wood, The New Yorker literary critic introducing Karl Ove Knausgaard this afternoon, the first time the Norwegian novelist came to New York there were about twenty people at his reading. The room was filled with empty seats.

Writing is thinking and, we hope, at its most precise. When we crack open the Difficult, there’s a surge of feeling and emotion, understanding, that “I get it!” moment. If we’re wanting to avoid the Difficult (notice I’ve started capitalizing it, what is that about?) novel or short story, then what are we feeling? And, what are we thinking?

Everyone I worked with was fairly desensitized to the day in and day out of human misery, until 9/11, when the news became personal for every American journalist, particularly those working in New York. I wasn’t in the newsroom that day – I was awaiting the arrival of my second child who was due September 11th. For the first time in years, I experienced a huge story – the biggest story of my life – from the disquieting distance of my home, and later a maternity ward.

I probably shouldn't have touched the oil paint. I know I wasn't supposed to. Please understand that my transgression was not an attempt at defiance or destruction. I never wanted to harm the painting, but at thirteen years old, my understanding of some things was not as clear as it is now. I wanted to touch Frida's hands, but because her hands weren't in the painting, I touched Diego's nose instead.

There is no independent force of evil in the Hebrew Bible or the Thousand Nights and One scholars have pointed out. A djinn or genie taking on the identity of a court appointed tempter, the Satan of The Book of Job, may be an emissary of ill report, the spy of the Oriental court, a Shaytan, sworn to the harm of man. Or he or she can simply be a creature of another realm. There are no witch-hunts, no searches for warlocks in the Arab or the Jewish world. Even the intercourse of men and women with djinns has its laws.

CASSIDY SARAH O'BRIAN was past thirty-eight and already divorced when she decided to write her thesis on the language of the Outer Citak. They were a remote people of the Maukele forests closely related to the Inner Citak and, more remotely, with the Korowai. She had studied them for some years, aware that they represented to the linguist a niche of underrepresented possibilities. They were Neolithic horticulturalists and no one knew whether they had a past imperfect tense in their language. They might be useful when it came time to post her mark on posterity.

SHE COULD HAVE been a boy. Her chest looked stripped of the fat and muscle that make breasts possible. Although this was the first time I'd seen her topless, I felt as though I'd seen her bones somewhere before, in the mirror over my bathroom sink after a bath—the chest of a bony nine year old boy—a reflection.

Since its inception, Fiction has aimed to bring the experimental to a broader audience, and to bring new voices to the forefront, publishing emerging authors alongside well known and established writers. Find out more about getting published in Fiction at our Submissions page.